


put out the stars (they are not wanted)

by liminal



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Post-War, sorry this one's a bit of a downer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-10
Updated: 2020-11-10
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:20:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27497851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminal/pseuds/liminal
Summary: "The hurt is in not dying when others do, in coming back to fight when you’re bone weary. The hurt’s in wishing, for one desperate second, that you were under the snow with your parents or beyond the shadow of the Veil, blissfully beyond reach of this world."Grief, after the fight at the Ministry and the Battle of Hogwarts.Remus, George and Harry come to terms with what they've lost.
Relationships: Fred Weasley & George Weasley, Harry Potter & Fred Weasley & George Weasley, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	put out the stars (they are not wanted)

**Author's Note:**

> kudos to whoever headcannoned that Kingsley was the fifth boy in the Marauders' dormitory.
> 
> unfortunately I'm not John Hannah breaking hearts in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but you can read this in his voice if you like.
> 
> title taken from W H Auden's 'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone':  
>  _"He was my North, my South, my East and West,  
>  My working week and my Sunday rest,  
> My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;  
> I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong"_

Harry and his friends are bundled off to Hogwarts, bruised and battle-worn, and Remus returns to his flat alone.

Again.

In time Kingsley will come by, quill and paper at the ready, half the sheets topped with Ministry letterhead. _Fudge is mobilising the Aurors,_ he’ll say, _organising them into a taskforce. Officially I need to know from you what happened, who was where, who did what. A plan at last,_ he’ll say wryly, but the half-smile won’t reach his eyes.

 _Unofficially, I- What do you need, Remus,_ he’ll ask and he’ll bow out gracefully when Remus spits out the basic facts of battle, says all he needs is to be alone.

 _When you’re ready,_ Kingsley will say on the threshold to the dingy flat. Remus will shut the door before he’s turned around, and let himself be enveloped by darkness.

Again.

It hadn’t bothered Kingsley, being the fifth boy in their dormitory, the silent stagehand in their theatre of chaos. They’d strewn laundry and odd bits of Quidditch kit across the room, stayed up til ungodly hours and crept back in looking much worse for wear, and Kingsley had never ratted them out. Told them, justifiably, at 2 am when James was prattling on, to shut the fuck up. He’d even lent a hand in pranks when their involvement would have been too obvious, and gone with them when Sirius wanted his ear pierced. 

“Benjy bet me two Sickles that Black’ll cry, I’m not missing out on this.”

But he’d never sought to be one of them, to join their troupe of merry men.

“Just as well,” Sirius had once said. “His Animagus is probably something stupid like a lion, and Merlin knows he’d never fit inside the Shack.”

Not a marauder in life and not one in death, either. Intruding upon Remus’ grief now, after so many years, would be so alien an action that the thought won’t even occur to Kingsley.

So he’ll leave Remus to his tears, two boys left of five and there’ll be no reconciliation by the dying embers.

It’s bitingly cold in the flat, six floors up in a concrete monstrosity in East London and the boiler is buggered. Probably has been for months, but Remus hasn’t been here for months. For all Sirius had ranted and raved about the mausoleum he returned to every summer, Grimmauld Place had become home to both of them, a sanctuary with fires in every room when Remus returned from stints with Fenrir and the rest of his kin; when Sirius would eye the bones poking through his skin and tell him fiercely, “You’re not one of them. You’re one of us.”

In the morning he’ll drop off a note with his landlady, a Muggle so doddery he’s long since stopped needing to Confund her when she comes to collect rent. He’d almost feel bad, but the pity she’d shown a prematurely greying man in threadbare clothes over a decade ago had long since hardened into dislike, and an oft-voiced suspicion that it was Remus’ appearance that drove down rent in a dilapidated block of flats long overdue for demolition. 

In the morning… if he wakes up in the morning, that is. 

It’s tempting not to. To follow where unconsciousness beckons and hurt ends. To reach for the hands stretching out to him: James and Lily, Marlene and Dorcas, the Prewett twins so like their namesake nephews and his parents and… Sirius.

Sirius, who’d stretch out a fine-boned hand no longer aged from prison, palm side up for Remus to interlock soft fingers with his own. 

Sirius, to lead him on to who knows where with his usual lolloping grace, the smile that says the mystery is worth the journey, the risk what makes it fun.

Sirius, who was his first and last, his North Star leading the way. Who never looked at him but saw those halcyon school days when they were kings, those early days of war when martyrdom still seemed exciting. Who never looked at Harry but to see James first, before green eyes blinked and the illusion was broken.

 _Oh God, Harry. I ought to write to him, go to see him,_ Remus thinks wildly, tell him the stories he otherwise won’t hear. Except… except there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to. He’s the last bastion now, the keeper of their secrets and jokes and midnight adventures. The only one who knows what happened to Dorcas’ rabbit and what, exactly, happened in Rome. The only one who remembers the precise shade of Lily’s hair, which photos never could quite capture, and the days that went into the making of the Map.

The only one who knows of nights spent tracing the hollows beneath Sirius’ clavicles, of sharp little gasps and unsteady movements. He’d never thought of moonlight as beautiful before he saw it bathe those proud Black features.

He’s the only one. 

Again.

Moonlight filters through the cracks in the curtains, silver slivers he can’t escape, and there’s no beauty in curling up on the bare floorboards and letting the pain wash over him.

-

May 9th, a week after the battle ended. A week when lives put on pause were supposed to be kickstarted, when they were supposed to be revelling in victory.

Instead it’s been a week of funerals, sorting the dead and finding the injured; watching the dissembling of the Ministry. That dazzling moment of euphoria they experienced in the middle of a scrum in the Great Hall might come again, but it’s not welcome at the moment.

Early morning sunlight filters through the windows like weak tea, and the Burrow’s kitchen is golden. Eight hands on Mrs Weasley’s clock point to ‘home’ and one dangles somewhere between that and ‘mortal peril’, swinging aimlessly.

Harry can’t take his eyes off it.

There’s something grotesque about the movement, with its hang-dog arc and the way the hand wants to settle on ‘home’ before gravity pulls it down again. Grotesque, but also darkly amusing and utterly ridiculous, that a clock without hands or numbers should somehow capture the limbo they’ve found themselves in. 

It’s almost enough to make Harry laugh aloud. Something in him wants to disrupt the early morning solitude, the quiet that doesn’t yet feel safe. He wants to know whether, after dying and fighting and crying and screaming, he’s still capable of laughter. Except he’s half afraid that he isn’t and half afraid that once he starts laughing, he won’t be able to stop.

That really might be enough to get him carted off to St Mungo’s, in a bed for life next to his old Defence teacher. Maybe they could sign autographs together.

Instead he settles for sipping his lukewarm Earl Grey and listening for the patter of gnome feet on the patio outside. Funny how he notices the small things more now. Back in the Forest, he’d heard every twig snap underfoot, been deafened by the thumping of his heart against his ribs. He’d put it down then to his impending death, an event there would be no wriggling away from this time, but maybe now this is what it means to have peace. A chance to watch the grass grow.

“You’ve gone mad, Potter,” he says to himself, shaking his head free of poetic thoughts. Maybe he wasn’t so far off the mark with the bed at Mungo’s.

“Could’ve told you that a long time ago.”

Harry whips around to face the stairs so quickly his neck twinges, though neither he nor his visitor miss how quickly his wand is in hand and trained at the intrusion.

“Give a bloke some warning,” Harry grumbles half-heartedly and he rubs the sore spot as George slopes into the room and over to the kettle.

Seeing George downstairs is like seeing snow in June, and Harry’s on unsure footing in either scenario. The tea he’s drunk rises with a sharp tang in his throat, and with it a million bitten-back apologies, a self-pitying justification for why he’s here, in the Burrow, living and breathing when Fred isn’t.

Harry swallows it all down and George settles in a chair not too far away, steaming mug of tea in hand. The gap between them feels like the space between continents. 

Harry’s never had to make conversation with either of the twins before. Stupid comments, jokes, complaints about Wood’s training techniques and comparisons with Angelina’s have always flowed like water between them, easy and light. They’ve been through practice sessions in gale force winds, celebrated wins and commiserated loses, mimed sending Stinging Hexes at Michael Corner in the Room of Requirement.

It was the twins who gave Harry the closest link to his father that he has. There’s not much personality about a cloak that’s been around for hundreds of years, but the Marauders’ Map quite literally has James Potter written all over it.

And it was the twins who heeded Ron’s call and flew a car across the country, in the dead of night, to rescue him from a bedroom with bars on the window. 

The twins. Always plural, even if only one of them was around. FredandGeorge running into one word, each boy the other’s shadow. Being alone must be like losing your orbiting star.

They sit in silence now, slurping tea for the sake of having something to do.

Until-

“You’ve died,” George says in a rock salt rasp. It’s the head voice of someone who hasn’t strung together a full sentence for nearly a week, whose tongue will trip over words longer than two syllables, whose throat is parched from crying. “Does it hurt?”

It still sounds like a child’s question.

Did it hurt, Harry wonders, when Voldemort’s curse finally hit him? He doesn’t remember any pain, though the new scar on his chest had been crusted with blood by the time he’d finally been able to take a look at it. Maybe there had been pain, when the unknown Horcrux had been destroyed, and King’s Cross had been nothing more than protection against the agony. 

The hurt is in not dying when others do, in coming back to fight when you’re bone weary. The hurt’s in wishing, for one desperate second, that you were under the snow with your parents or beyond the shadow of the Veil, blissfully beyond reach of this world.

What hurts is waking up each morning.

But that’s not what he tells George.

“No,” he says, and a small smile stretches over cracked lips. “It’s like falling asleep.”

He thinks George also smiles a little at that. Strange how Sirius always seemed to have the right words for the moment.

They slip into silence again, occasionally waving a wand to refill an empty mug. It’s approaching 7 am and the house is beginning to stir above them. There are no real demands on their time, no alarm clocks to obey or desks to return to, but by unspoken pact they’d all agreed that wasting away in bed was no life at all. Anyone not roused by the creaking of old pipes comes down to the smell of bacon and eggs each morning, and life begins afresh.

The fact that Harry’s had maybe five hours’ sleep in the last three days is a secret he’ll keep to himself over breakfast.

The creaking of floorboards as feet stumble towards bathrooms seems to jolt George back to the present. “How have you done it,” he whispers, and for one horrendous moment, Harry thinks he’s asking how he lives with himself, with the lie he told to Kingsley in the first few days after the battle. 

He still isn’t sure what exactly made him tell the Acting Minister for Magic a potted version of the truth. A feeling of unease had gnawed away at him, telling him that Kingsley was no longer just Kingsley, that the Ministry was still in no man’s land, and the peace they’d won was fragile. Better to obfuscate now and come clean later than put information into the wrong hands, he’d thought, and he’d shoved aside all thoughts of deceit and Dumbledore and death at the top of the tallest tower.

So they’d sat in one of the large rooms at Muriel Prewett’s house, a safe haven while Aurors cleared the Burrow, and Harry hadn’t exactly been forthcoming as Kingsley gently probed.

_Where did you go after the wedding was interrupted? How did you get into the Ministry? What happened at Malfoy Manor? So all the Horcruxes have been destroyed? What did you mean, when you spoke about the Elder Wand?_

Harry had almost laughed at that last one. “Nothing,” he’d said, as Ron and Hermione shot him puzzled looks. “Just buying time. Voldemort believed in it, so I- I thought it might make him stop, if he thought his plan wouldn’t work.”

Kingsley had left not long afterwards and Harry had turned to face the rest of the Weasleys.

“Was that true, Harry,” Mr Weasley had asked, his voice unusually grave.

“No. Partly. But I’m not ready to tell the truth yet,” he’d replied.

He still isn’t. Telling the truth about Horcruxes and house elves and the follies of the Peverells means bringing the story into the light. How exactly do you begin a conversation that, somewhere along the way, has to address him being an unholy combination of pawn for two dead men; the seventh, unintended Horcrux; and a character from a children’s tale?

Except that’s not what George is getting at, at all.

“How have you done it,” he continues, as though Harry hasn’t just lapsed into silent thought. “Lost everyone and kept going?”

A pause, and then-

“I don’t know how to do it without Fred.”

How do you answer that one? Harry’s lost parents and a godfather, friends and mentors, but he’s never lost a brother- Fred’s the closest he’s come. Grief is less an albatross round his shoulders than a companion he loses briefly, only to find it again.

“You don’t have a choice, really,” Harry says slowly, not wanting to look George in the eye. “You just… do. You don’t let it go to waste.”

Before he can stop himself, the truth comes spilling out. “I wanted to follow Sirius, into the Veil in the Ministry. And then I wanted to die in that Forest. I wanted it all to stop. But then- When I had the choice, to come back or not, it wasn’t really a choice at all. I just didn’t want it to end like that. And my parents and Sirius and Remus and Fred… they weren’t quitters. And they wouldn’t want us to be either."

Offloading the truth, even this small part of it, makes the morning feel even more golden and the weight in his chest a little lighter. It’s not death that Harry fears, just dying without living, however agonising being alive can be.

As he sucks in a deep breath, Harry chances a look at George. Sunlight glints off tear tracks crusted onto his cheeks and the bottom drops out of Harry’s stomach. How has he possibly made an already shit situation even shitter?

“Sorry, I-“ He flounders, begins to apologise, but George smiles a little at him.

“Thanks,” he whispers, and Harry’s heart begins to beat a little less erratically 

Over the pounding of blood in his ears, he hears Mrs Weasley announcing the breakfast menu to the family on her way downstairs. Errol swoops down from nowhere, pecking at the outside window frame with a package of letters clasped in his beak; and Charlie starts complaining about how little hot water’s been left for him.

Keep this up, he threatens, and he’ll be back in Romania by the end of the week. Shift your arse and get out of bed sooner, is Bill’s prompt suggestion; and any choice Romanian comebacks are washed down the drain.

Another day in the Burrow begins and this one seems a little more hopeful than the last.

Mrs Weasley’s on the fifth step from bottom now, muttering to herself about fried eggs and toast, and Harry reckons he’s got another thirty seconds with George before the moment is lost.

“Besides,” he says, his voice somehow carrying over the din, “they never really leave us. Not if they love us.”

On the clock behind George, each arc that Fred’s hand completes brings him a little closer to ‘home’.


End file.
